AI stock sell-off spreads to Asian markets
Technology shares fell sharply in South Korea and Japan, extending a Wall Street retreat as the Kospi triggered a marketwide trading halt and the Nikkei 225 dropped 5.0% intraday.
Asian technology shares fell sharply on Thursday, extending an AI-linked Wall Street sell-off into South Korea and Japan. South Korea’s Kospi was down 7.9% at 5,532.74 in intraday trading, while Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 5.0% at 64,340.84.
The Korea Exchange halted trading in all Kospi-listed shares for 20 minutes from 12:38 p.m. Korea Standard Time after the index remained more than 8% below its previous close. Under the exchange’s market rules, a phase-one circuit breaker is triggered when the Kospi or Kosdaq stays at least 8% below the previous day’s close for one minute. The 20-minute suspension is followed by a 10-minute single-price auction before continuous trading resumes.
Chipmakers recorded some of the largest declines. Samsung Electronics was down 11.4% and SK Hynix fell 12.0%. In Japan, SoftBank Group was down 9.4%, Tokyo Electron lost 7.8% and Kioxia Holdings fell 13.1%. The figures were intraday readings, not official closing levels.
The decline extended across the region. Taiwan’s Taiex was down 3.4%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 1.4% and the Shanghai Composite fell 2.0%. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was down 0.1%.
The Asian session followed losses on Wall Street, where the S&P 500 ended the previous session down 1.1% and the Nasdaq Composite fell 1.9%. Nvidia lost 3.2%, Broadcom 3.1% and AMD 5.7%.
Lorraine Tan, Morningstar’s director of equity research for Asia, described the concern as a possible mismatch between technology-sector growth expectations and eventual outcomes. Her assessment was an interpretation, not a measured cause of the declines.
Bond markets provided additional context. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield stood at 5.11% early Thursday after briefly exceeding 5.32% on Wednesday. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said September consumer prices rose 0.6% from August and 3.7% from a year earlier, up from a 3.4% annual increase in August. Inflation, the energy shock and rising U.S. government debt have been cited as pressures on longer-term yields, but the available evidence does not establish debt, valuations or AI-spending expectations as a single cause of the Asian equity moves.
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